So tomorrow is Thanksgiving and my sister is on her way to NYC so we can go watch the Macy's parade. Yoiks! This is my second Thanksgiving this year, since I was up in Canadia last month when they had theirs. I think they add a "u" to the word "Thanksgiving" up there, but I'm not sure.

A guy asked me recently about what he called the "Microsoft-ization of Zen." I'm not exactly sure why he used this term. He meant the way there are lots of people out there hawking products that are essentially Zen, but without actually calling it "Zen." They carefully avoid using words like "Buddhism" or "dharma," even though most of their schtick comes straight out of Zen books. Sometimes straight out of my Zen books!

I've noticed this too and it bugs me. I'm well aware that using words like "Zen" or "Buddhism" or "dharma" will essentially cut your potential audience by at least half. Hell, when I make even the smallest mention of Dogen in these pages I get half a dozen comments about how I'm just promoting the "cult of Dogen" rather than "actual Buddhism." I'm gonna try to address that topic another time, though.

But all these dudes out there hawking Zen but not calling it Zen, why would that bug me? It bugs me because they seem to want to imply that you can just decide to be more "in the moment" and it'll happen. Or they offer some new miracle method to get you there "quickly, easily and effectively" (the verbatim claim of one such method I just came across). Those methods don't work, of course. Though they might provide some kind of short term thrills.

It's like if you woke up one morning and realized you were fat. Not only you. You realized your whole society was made up almost exlusively of people who were at least 200 pounds overweight and that every service, entertainment, occupation, etc. in the entire society was geared toward making already fat people more fat. You couldn't just decide not to be fat in such a society. You'd need to spend a lot of time, effort and energy just figuring out how one could lose weight. Your senses might be so dulled by the environment that you wouldn't even be able to recognize someone of healthy weight. Your friends would all describe such a person as dangerously ill.

Methods like Big Mind® and their ilk strike me as the all-cupcake-diets of this imaginary landscape. Some blubbery guy tells you that the best way to get to a healthy weight is to eat as many cupcakes as possible because what you really want is not to be 200 pounds overweight but three or four-hundred pounds heavier than you are now.

Anyway, yeah, the whole idea of cribbing from Zen without really understanding what it is and hiding the source of your inspiration lest it scare away paying customers irks me. And I'll admit it, one of the reasons it bugs me is because I can't do it myself and therefore I make way less money than the people who do. It would feel far too dishonest. Whatever minor insights I have come through Zen Buddhist practice. If I were to deny that I'd be cheating.

Anyway, plenty of people don't think I have any insights at all. I got an email the other day that said "You are an egoist and have no wisdom to offer!" Gee, thanks. That's sweet.

117 comments:

Uh, hmm... Ekhart tolle? I dunno.. so many people have bits and pieces of Buddhism. From Christian to Muslim(ok maybe not Muslim but I confess ignorance). Hard to say who is following the axioms of Zen enough to make a valid comparison.

What do i mean? For many past years many different little or bigger companies created some software solutions, which were copied and sold by Microsoft as their innovations. And so people in their mass don't know the source of the idea of windows interface in Windows, mouse device etc. They get it via Microsoft and accept M as the source of the inventions.

For many past years many different little or bigger companies created some software solutions, which were copied and sold by Big Corporation as their innovations.

There, I fixed that for you. It's not just Microsoft doing this. Apple, Oracle, SAP, IBM, you name it, they've done it.

Of course Apple sometimes does things a little differently. Some small company creates a useful little application that they build their business model around, and then Apple goes and replicates the exact same thing in their next OSX update. Way to treat the little guys right, Steve!

I used Microsoft as a metaphor of removing the basic credits and presenting some ideas as own.

There is more in this topic:

The same goes with "sit down and meditate" boxes in the middle of wellnes/stress reduction articles in pop-psychology magazines. I have just read such a sidenote with meditation instructions - plain vipassana! But I have never spot a word about the troubles of meditation, pain, all this. They just say : "you are modern high-class woman, all you need is sit down and look for your breath, and everything will be cool. (Of course it's not, but... if it's not ok, it's your fault/problem, maybe you are not as high class iron woman as you pretend to be?)"

The question is: is there any way to unscrew such people, who tried "to meditate" and failed, thinking "meditation is cool, but it's not for me"?

Unfortunately I am afraid it might not be possible or easy, because they were misled and now they believe there is a better world, full of relax and higher states of meditation, which they want to get to, but believe they are just not good enough. :(

They bought a dream of calm world, and the dealer is the last person who wants to stop selling the dream. :(

You might have been referring to comments I made here & on my blog re: Dogen. I don't wish my comments to be taken to mean that I denigrate your training realization in any way. It's just that Zen is much more expansive than Dogen or Lin-Ji or whomever in partcular. It also, as you note, takes a lifetime of dedication and effort. Especially when not on the cushion.

Your fat society comparison got me directly in the gut. I lost a bunch of extra weight while living in caffeine&donut world. I still live in caffeine&donut world, I just don't eat meals there anymore. It's weird how many people are so totally against spinach they feel they must save me from the dangerous green glop by offering me sugar...

I said "it's a good review" of Brad's book - as in she likes it. Not as in 'it's an admirable piece of writing' (it's ok).

Harry, Babs and I had a long chat once. She didn't listen, she made assumptions, she was rude, dismissive and arrogant, and deleted one if H's comments accusing him of having written something unforgivably 'ugly' (tosh!) - all in the name of bringing correct "Buddhism" to the masses.

'The Mirror principle' - one of Mike Cross's favourites - does sound like it should be true and often seems so. But I wonder...

Once, while slightly intoxicated, I called a female friend of mine "a stupid bitch". I muttered it very convincingly under my breath. She was familiar with my dry caustic wit - it was one of things about me that she liked and it usually made her laugh. This time she became quite upset and a little angry. "You had to have that in you to say it. You said it like you meant it". I reassured her that no way did I think she was a stupid bitch. Surely she knew that. I was just playing.

I thought about it later. Yes, it was "in me" or I couldn't have said it. But that's what actors do; find 'other people' in themselves via some kind of mimetic empathy. I myself have never considered my friend a stupid bitch.

I think our objections to others might sometimes be examples of that kind of empathic recognition, rather than examples of what we find despicable in own characters reflected back. Dunno.

I have to say, I essentially disagree with the thesis that you can't just decide to be "in the moment," and I speak here from my own personal experience.

To use the cupcake metaphor, what ought to be realize is that what it's more similar to is a society wherein ALMOST EVERYONE is 200 pounds overweight, and ALMOST ALL of society is geared towards making you fatter. But there are those who have broken free of the cupcake cycle, and we run into those few everyday (we may simply not be actively aware).

In our encounters with the anti-fat social forces, we accidentally, unconsciously learn about them every day, through no direct effort of our own (accidental "wu wei"?). Then, one day, the accumulated mass of subconscious awareness can come to a head, and we can realize, (again, with no intentional effort of our own) that there IS another way to be, and that the resources ARE on hand.

We can then cycle through the observations that we have made our entire lives and re-analyze them in a fashion more suited towards not being fat. In that moment of realization of the possibility (and desirability) of this, we have decided to not be fat, and at this point it's just a logical execution of our new awareness that brings us towards manifested not-fatness. This logical execution can continue to take no real effort, because it began with no real effort and the essentially effortless baby-step process of exploration continuously opens up new understandings about how to slim down and still live a fulfilling life. This process can continue almost of its own self-perpetuating accord, without any experienced effort on the fat guy's part, and lead, over time, to the fat guy being slim.

In this way, the fat guy decides, in a single moment, to be slim, and he achieves this goal with zero experienced hardship (wei wu wei), as a direct causal chain stemming from his decision. In a sense, he decided to be slim, and thus was no longer slim, and it simply took manifested reality a little while to catch up.

"Anyway, yeah, the whole idea of cribbing from Zen without really understanding what it is and hiding the source of your inspiration lest it scare away paying customers irks me. And I'll admit it, one of the reasons it bugs me is because I can't do it myself and therefore I make way less money than the people who do. It would feel far too dishonest. Whatever minor insights I have come through Zen Buddhist practice. If I were to deny that I'd be cheating."

For an authentic zen teacher you certainly have a lot of opinions. Let me get this straight - you are saying that there are people who borrow from zen teachings but they don't really understand these teachings and then have the nerve to teach these things to others without telling them they borrowed these teachings from zen. And to add insult to injury they make more money than you. That's pretty far out -) Is this growth industry?

Hysterion, Maybe you should just toss Brad a donation for every comment you make. Even the anonymous comments.. You really do owe it to Brad for using his blog as your own personal soapbox. What do you say?

"The Buddha-Dharma is not any kind of theism, nor any kind of atheism. The Buddha-Dharma is not any kind of -ism. The Buddha-Dharma is not anybody's view. The Buddha-Dharma is not Buddhism. The Buddha-Dharma is the Dharma of Gautama the Buddha."

Oh, this explains why I'm suddenly getting lots of hits on that post about Brad, HHDL and "God" (Brad Warner vs. the Dalai Lama). That post actually has quite a bit to do with Brad and His Holiness, as well as ex-Buddhist turned arch-conservative Roman Catholic Paul Williams, fifth century Chinese Buddhist scholar Tao-Sheng, King Asoka, the Bhagavad Gita, Anagarika Dharmapala, etc.

"Anyway, yeah, the whole idea of cribbing from Zen without really understanding what it is and hiding the source of your inspiration lest it scare away paying customers irks me. And I'll admit it, one of the reasons it bugs me is because I can't do it myself and therefore I make way less money than the people who do. It would feel far too dishonest. Whatever minor insights I have come through Zen Buddhist practice. If I were to deny that I'd be cheating."

I think this one point is the key to understanding what is good and what is bad in Western "alternative" spirituality. On the one hand, there are those who acknowledge the sources that they draw upon, and who thereby run the risk of "scaring away customers". On the other hand you have those who repackage Buddhist, Hindu and other ancient teachings, but who refuse to list the ingredients on the package.

Long before he hooked up with Genpo, Ken Wilber made a very nice career for himself ripping off the teachings of Sri Aurobindo, dumbing them down, and calling them his own. meh.

This is "Big Mind" folks same as Genpo...NO difference at all... both beautiful descriptions.

What I'm about to say might seem like mysticism, but here goes anyhow. Once you start seeing this moment for what this moment really is, you start to understand that you can never really be annihilated in the ways that you previously imagined could happen. What I think of as "Brad Warner" is a construct in my mind. It isn't real. Yet there is a real something upon which that mental construct I've called "Brad Warner" is based. This something can't really die because it was never really born. At least not in the sense we commonly think of things being born and dying. Yes, Brad Warner was born and yes Brad Warner will die. And yet he is not just an individual entity. He is also a temporary manifestation of something vast and unknowable that has no beginning and no end.